Discover The Business School Classroom Of The Future

What if HBS in fact stood for Harvard Building Site? The appetite from benefactors to leave a legacy in their name sees the business school dean Nitin Noria regularly wielding a spade to break the ground on new facilities as part of a campus built on philanthropy.

Tata Hall, named in honor of Ratan N. Tata, who served as chairman of one of India’s largest business conglomeratres, Tata Group, is a recent example - a glass and brick building that includes residential space and classrooms with panoramic views of the Charles River. It has been joined this summer by the Ruth Mulan Chu Chao Center, ­a gift from the Chao family that acts as a hub for executives, faculty and MBA students.

But the ambitious construction plans don’t stop there, and HBS has filed detailed plans with the Boston Redevelopment Authority for two new buildings on its campus in Allston as part of Harvard’s Institutional Master Plan from 2013. They include a 1,000-seat auditorium big enough to fit an entire MBA class.

Harvard is not alone in building for the future. Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management has committed $220 million to complete a 410,000 square-foot lakefront education center that they hope will capture the spirit and energy of the school and its approach to community building. The Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina opened its new $100 million wireless building in 2015 featuring a 500-seater lecture hall, innovative systems to measure air quality and energy usage and a state-of-the-art electronic trading room replete with real-time stock ticker and banks of Bloomberg terminals.

Meanwhile in New York, Columbia Business School is eagerly waiting for the keys to a 17-acre site in Harlem known as Manhattanville, with the promise of "building a new home for generations of future leaders." Historic pledges of over $100 million from Henry Kravis ’69, cofounder of private equity firm KKR, and Ronald Perelman, a deal-maker that Forbes estimates to have a net worth of $12.3 billion, have combined with pledges made by graduating Columbia students.

Over on the west coast, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley expects to open up the new North Academic Building to students in early 2017. At a cost of $60 million, the new space claims "cutting-edge facilities to accommodate future advancements in management education, where classroom and digital learning will work together to foster community, while offering sweeping views of the Bay Area." In keeping with the school’s commitment to the environment, the building incorporates digital displays of real-time energy data.

This is all good business for the architecture firms that are behind each of these projects, whose poetic building descriptions might qualify them for teaching a marketing communications class to MBA students. They might however want to curb their overuse of the words "ground-breaking," "cutting-edge" and "unique."

But beyond the hundreds of millions of dollars devoted to glass and steel, and the panoramic views of rivers, lakes and silicon valleys, what about the classrooms themselves? After all, the greatest challenge facing business schools and their students is digital. So what will the business school classroom of the future look like?

Back in Boston, the answer is not to be found on the HBS campus, but in the facility of public broadcaster WGBH, a ten-minute ride from the school. This is where Harvard has built its classroom of the future, and what it calls HBX Live. Revealed last year, HBX Live captures a global classroom where participants situated all around the world can be seen on a single screen to communicate and interact in a live virtual classroom. Rather than architects, Harvard turned to technology providers such as Cisco, BSS and X20 to provide uninterrupted power supply, and crystal clear video and audio for up to 60 students without delayed response times or glare.

A person looks on at HBX Live, an online classroom that allows real-time interaction between professors and students from around the world, at the WGBH television studios in Boston, Friday, Aug. 21, 2015. (AP Photo/Gretchen Ertl)

The school has not revealed the cost of fitting out the proprietary classroom, but dollar for dollar the impact of the new virtual classroom has the potential to turn business education on its head.

Determined to not be left behind in the digital age, business schools from Europe are also innovating when it comes to the future of learning. IE Business School in Spain launched its WOW (Window on the World) Room in October this year. Located on IE’s Madrid campus, the WOW Room is a physical space with 48 screens that comprise a digital tapestry of 45m2 shaped in the form of a “U” and with up to 200 degree vision. The hardware includes two tactile screens and cameras that permit the recording and editing of sessions in real time. In order to coordinate the space, the WOW Room team works with latest generation computers, SyncRTC servers, robots and holographic projectors.

Professors can either be physically present or projected in hologram form and moved around the room by a robot in order to interact with students. All classes are recorded to enable subsequent access and reviewing of content.

“Technology is revolutionizing our lives and we are moving in the direction it is taking us,” says Diego Alcázar Benjumea, Vice President of IE Business School. “We have invested 25 million euros in innovative learning projects over the last 15 years , and this learning space takes us to the next level of our commitment to technology immersion. Students will take decisions under pressure. They will find themselves in the midst of business crises, be required to define production processes in factory environments, negotiate war situations and resolve diplomatic conflicts between countries, to name just a few potential scenarios.”

MBA Classrooms such as at emlyon Paris are equipped with high digital technology to learn, exchange and create (credit (emlyon)

While a commitment to internationalization has seen France’s Emlyon Business School expand to campuses in Shanghai and Casablanca, as well as a new learning hub and incubator in Paris, in the school has also linked up with IBM to unveil its Smart Business School to deliver personalized, on-demand business education on a global basis via the IBM Cloud. “The aim is to provide continuous feedback, collaborative space and connections, wherever our students are in the world and at every step along their career path. Just as TV viewers can cherry-pick their own entertainment, so our community can choose when, where and how much it learns”, says the school’s Dean, Bernard Belletante.

But are schools getting carried away with digital learning? Marion Debruyne, Dean of Belgium’s Vlerick Business School believes that there can sometimes be too much focus on the latest technology, and has set-about transforming the way the school teaches its students – incorporating interactive learning spaces in place of traditional classrooms.

"It is undoubtedly important that classroom design keeps up with learning innovation. You could even say that, in some cases, the learning environment can be the driver of the schools whole approach to teaching. Traditional classrooms were designed for teaching in an era where students were seen as passive recipients of expert knowledge. They mirrored the mass production approach prevalent in factories. Today, the most important thing is that classrooms are spaces that foster active learning, engagement and creativity. Sometimes re-inventing the learning space can be to get rid of tables and put chairs in a circle, or even get rid of chairs and have learners move around and interact. As often when talking about learning innovation, the focus is too much on technology. Technology is a very important enabler, but it is not the answer to everything."

For David Lefevre, Director of the Edtech Lab at Imperial College Business School in the U.K., technology is nevertheless at the heart of the future learning experience. “It is advances in technology that have unlocked the potential of online learning. Ten years ago the technologies needed to build an effective online program were both complex and costly to implement, requiring a huge investment in time, expertise and money from schools without any guaranteed return or success-rate. Many schools instead opted to use a third party propriety system which, though offering a cheaper alternative with ready-to-use technology and a bank of engineers on standby to fix faults, often presented a very poor learning experience for enrolled students.”

Lefevre insists that such platforms are technologically stunted when compared to what websites outside of the education sphere such as Facebook and LinkedIn can offer. And as they are built to accommodate too wide a range of programs and too many students, the education cannot be tailored or customized.

Imperial’s approach has been to develop its own platform called The Hub, an online learning center and the bedrock of the school’s Global Online MBA (GMBA). It streams lectures and offers interaction with the same intuitive interface that users have become accustomed to on social media sites, and enables students to follow live events taking place on the Imperial campus. The platform has become so popular that full-time MBA students are also now accessing The Hub to catch up on course material they might otherwise have missed.

"Though many schools may be wary to engage in developing online MBAs, the number of suppliers in the market will need to grow to meet demand." David Lefevre, Imperial College Business School (credit Imperial College Business School)

“For our Global Online MBA program we felt that we had no choice but to build our own customized platform for students if we were to construct a high quality program which was equal if not superior to its full-time counterpart,” Lefevre explains. “We are a pioneering business school that is innovating to build the business school of the future.

He admits however that even the most advanced MBA programs cannot be delivered solely online. “To best ensure cohesion between the students and with the institution, Imperial blends online with face-to-face learning experiences to create a strong sense of community and life long relationships. The first weeks of the Global Online MBA are conducted in person, enabling students to build a foundation, forge bonds and get on the same page.”

As the Imperial GMBA continues to grow, they might need to pull out their own spades in South Kensington to start work on a new building.